


are you lost or incomplete?

by taywen



Category: Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Genre: Gen, Headcanon, Post-Canon, So much headcanon, everyone's dead but they're all in the afterlife, self-indulgent af
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-07
Packaged: 2019-06-06 15:29:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15197774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taywen/pseuds/taywen
Summary: Conversations Marek has with various members of his family, after.





	are you lost or incomplete?

**Author's Note:**

> back at it again with the trash fave! ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
> 
> title from Coldplay's "Talk".

Malgorzhata

The face of Sigmund's wife is the first thing Marek sees when he opens his eyes, but she is not as he remembers—her face had been pale beneath the blood, eyes unseeing and yet somehow—determined.

Marek scrambles to his feet when he realizes he's in Sigmund's apartments, though his brother's wife is the only other occupant. That fact is actually more disconcerting than if Sigmund had been there as well.

There had been other bodies the last time Marek was here. Soldiers in Rosyan colours, and the Sword, horribly burned and yet somehow still breathing. Too injured to speak, but her glare accusation enough. As if Marek had invited those assassins into Zamek Orla.

"Where's Solya?" Marek demands, striding toward Sigmund's wife. She's standing before the wardrobe, the same place he'd seen her last.

She stares at him with an expression he does not recognize, but then, he'd never made any effort to know her. They'd always known what they were to each other.

"Have you checked your bed?" she responds coolly.

Marek halts, shocked at her audacity. Sigmund and the king had never hesitated to make oblique reference to his relationship with Solya, but never so bluntly as this; no one else had dared mention it.

"He's not there," Marek says, rallying. He doesn't know how he knows that; doesn't (want to) remember how he ended up here.

"How fortunate for him," she says indifferently. "He'll turn up eventually."

Marek's jaw throbs; with an effort, he ungrits his teeth.

"I hope for your sake his arrival won't be a consequence of your poor decisions," she adds.

" _Rosya_ killed you," Marek snarls.

"Perhaps," she says. "But it was the Wood too. Alosha cut them down, and still they came." A brittle smile curves her mouth; it is different from the false smiles she used to aim at him, and the antithesis of the fond smiles she shared with her family. "I kept trying to get up too, to keep them from the children, but they cut me down soon enough."

"You should have called for the guards."

"I did. They were already dead. Perhaps the hero of Polnya could have saved me, had he not been too busy warming the Falcon's bed."

"I suppose you know now what became of Sigmund," Marek spits.

"Yes. I know."

Marek turns away. Solya is not here, of that Marek is nearly certain, but checking to be sure is far better than staying here with Sigmund's wife.

"I hope Stashek and Marisha accept their mother's death with more grace than you did," Malgorzhata remarks as he reaches the threshold.

He rounds on her. "Mother wasn't—" _dead_ , gets stuck in his throat. There is contempt in Malgorzhata's face, of course, but also something uncomfortably close to pity. He stalks out, slamming the door behind himself.

 

Sigmund

Zamek Orla is deserted, silent as a tomb, and Marek feels like a ghost as he walks through the castle's empty halls. When Marek tries to look out over the ramparts at Kralia proper, all he can see is a thick fog. He descends to the main courtyard, his boots silent on the stairs.

The front gates are shut tight on the mausoleum Zamek Orla has become.

Frustrated, Marek pounds his closed fist against the heavy wood, but he feels no pain. He does it again and again, shouting, screaming—but his voice does not go hoarse and his arms do not tire. His spirit breaks, eventually, and Marek presses his forehead against the unyielding gates.

When he gathers the will to turn around, he finds his brother standing patiently in the middle of the courtyard, clad in the armour he wore but rarely in life.

Marek hadn't come out to see Sigmund off after the queen had named him commander, of course, but he had happened to glance out his window and meet Sigmund's gaze as his brother was waving a final farewell to his wife and children.

The distance between them had been too great for Marek to discern what emotion, if any, Sigmund had displayed on his face; Marek would have told himself he did not care, in any case.

There is a surprising lack of recrimination on Sigmund's face now, but perhaps his brother is only concealing his emotions for the moment.

"I didn't want it like this," Marek says, the words dragged out of the gaping hole in his chest.

Sigmund raises his eyebrows, that same faintly-incredulous expression he always got whenever Marek said or did something that his older brother found exasperating. "I don't think anyone truly wants to die."

Marek flinches. "I'm not—"

"But my children aren't with you, at least."

"I wouldn't have," Marek says. "Sigmund—I would never have harmed them."

Sigmund doesn't answer immediately, his gaze unreadable as he studies Marek. He was always the more cautious of the two of them, ever-conscious of the burden of expectation and duty laid across his shoulders.

Marek had never had to deal with the weight of a looming crown but oh, how he'd wanted it.

"Not intentionally, perhaps," Sigmund says at length.

"I stopped her," Marek snaps.

(But if he'd truly stopped the queen, then why is he here?)

Marek pushes the thought away. Stashek and Marisha aren't here, which means that Solya, or the Dragon, or perhaps even Agnieszka, managed to stop the queen, surely.

"Time passes differently here," Sigmund says, as if he can read Marek's mind. "You spent hours pounding on the front gates, but you're not remotely tired, are you?"

"I did not spend _hours_ —"

"You did."

"No, I didn't," Marek insists, though he has the sneaking suspicion that he had, actually. He doesn't get tired and he wasn't counting how many times he punched futilely at the gates, but it was a while.

Sigmund's mouth twitches up, a ghost of the grin he used to share with Marek when they were both still children with two parents. "You definitely did."

"I did n—This is childish," Marek snarls, and Sigmund actually laughs. Of course he would; he was always focused on being a good future king, and good kings did not nurse grudges, or so Marek imagines his reasoning must have followed.

"It was two hours, at the most," Sigmund allows.

"And you just stood there watching me the entire time?" Marek wishes he still had his sword, but neither of them are armed. They're dressed for war, though lacking sword and shield or even a knife.

Marek already lost one battle of words; he has no intention of doing so again, with Sigmund of all people. He closes his teeth around everything else that wants to come tumbling off of his tongue and crosses his arms over his chest before the impulse to throttle Sigmund overcomes his sense. The suspicion that it would have little effect on Sigmund helps keep him in check.

"Marek," Sigmund says, abruptly sobering. All traces of his earlier mirth are gone; he watches Marek with those stupid earnest eyes, his own feelings set aside to deal with the latest crisis.

"What." Marek could never deal with his emotions so easily, and so his reply comes out through gritted teeth despite his efforts to remain neutral.

"Anger is—you should try to let it go. I know it isn't easy to accept—I know you never wanted my advice, and certainly not on matters such as these, but anger can change you here. It will warp you into something you're not."

"How do you know it hasn't already changed me?"

Twenty years of helpless fury, of clawing desperation, of knowing that his mother had been taken from him and _no one would do a thing about it_.

Sigmund's face softens. "You don't have to keep letting it, Marek."

Marek bares his teeth; he wants Sigmund's pity even less than he wanted Malgorzhata's. "It's a bit late to start changing now, isn't it?"

Sigmund says nothing when Marek shoulders past him; their armour does not even have the courtesy to clash together in remotely satisfactory manner.

 

Kasimir

All of the doors within the castle are closed, and most of them are locked, but those that are do not lead to rooms that Marek visited often, or at all.

The Charovnikov is a surprising exception: its grand doors are not only unlocked, but they stand open as well, though Marek had few occasions to visit the Hall of Wizards.

The king stands at the main table; Marek finds himself standing on the other side of it without making the conscious decision to enter the room.

"Marek."

"Father."

The words are spoken stiffly, with none of the affection one might expect from father and son, or king and prince.

They gaze at each other in silence. Sigmund took after the king; Marek more closely resembled his mother. In nature, Sigmund was closer to both of them.

Marek does not know which of them he inherited his potential for anger from; perhaps it is uniquely his own. Predictably, his patience breaks first.

"What, no disappointed lecture? No pointed remarks about my unsuitable behaviour?" Marek's angry voice should echo around the vast room, but the emptiness that pervades the castle seems to swallow his words instead.

"They made no impression upon you in life," the king replies calmly, but it is a forced calm rather than true placidity, and one that Marek is intimately familiar with. "Why should I waste my breath in death?"

"What else do you have to spend it on, besides worrying like an old grandmother?"

A spark of anger flashes in the king's eyes; Marek suspects his temper came from his father. He cannot ever recall his mother so much as raising her voice in annoyance.

"As ever, you mistake caution for weakness and disregard wisdom in favour of chasing your own glory."

"You _were_ weak!"

"No," the king says coldly. "Merely sentimental. I should have pushed you into the clergy, but you and Sigmund were all I had left of Hanna." His voice softens as he speaks of his wife, the woman he abandoned to the Wood and some Rosyan prince. How convenient that he should manage to dredge some guilt up now, so long after it could have been of any use.

"If you cared for her so, why didn't you _save her_?" Marek's throat aches with the question he'd demanded of his father so often when he was younger; the words have the same petulant, childish edge they had back then too.

"She was beyond saving." The king sounds tired now, as he used to in more recent years.

" _I_ saved her," Marek snarls.

"You brought back her corpse and paraded it around like a toy," the king roars back, with an anger he had never displayed to Marek, before. "You brought ruin to us all, and you were proud to do it!"

Marek flinches back, for a moment glad for the stone table that separates them. "I didn't—" He bites back the rest of his explanation, of his excuse; it does not change the fact that the majority of their family was wiped out as a result of his actions, regardless of his intent.

And, in truth, he had intended to supplant Sigmund, and the only way he could have ascended the throne without risking ruinous civil war was if Sigmund were dead.

Marek still managed to pit Polnya's army against itself even after Sigmund's death. He should be glad all of those men he spent laying siege to the Dragon and Agnieszka aren't here as well; he has no idea what he would say to them.

"I just wanted to see Mother again," Marek says finally. It isn't quite a plea for understanding, and it's far too late for forgiveness. Sigmund may not hold a grudge against Marek, but the king was never so quick to forget past wrongs.

Perhaps that is where they differed: Sigmund saw how their father had hardened his heart against their mother's apparent betrayal and vowed that he would not do the same, while Marek turned from their father as he had done to their mother.

The king looks away now, his back half turned to Marek. His expression is impossible to read in profile; Marek does not recognize it at all. "You can see her now. She is here."

 

Hanna

Marek does not remember the last time he saw his mother. She had disappeared without warning, there one day and gone the next, and Prince Vasily with her. Marek had not known to cherish those moments, and so had not paid them any special attention, and as time wore on, he had forgotten so many things about her.

The sound of her voice, the shape of her face; he could see some of her in himself, but less and less as the years rolled past. The king had removed all of her portraits from the walls, and forbidden her name to be spoken. Those that dared speak of her did so disparagingly, until Marek grew old enough to make them regret it.

His mother is in her garden, the private courtyard vibrant and alive in a way it had ceased to be after her disappearance. Marek had avoided the area on his first pass through the castle, as was his usual habit. He lived with the ache of her absence everyday, he had no need of further reminders.

"Mother," Marek breathes.

Hanna looks up from the rosebush she's tending and smiles.

She is just as he remembers: not as the Wood's creature, hard and blank and changed, but as she truly was. Her hands are soft against his face, slightly gritty with dirt, and nothing like the stiff marionette that he'd dragged out of the Wood.

"Marechek," Hanna says warmly, just as she used to, and for a second Marek thinks that, perhaps, she doesn't know what he's done.

"Mother," Marek says again, the word catching in his throat. He squeezes his eyes shut and allows her to pull his head down to her shoulder. She smells like the earth, reminiscent of the Wood, but also like the flowers that abound in her garden. There had been few flowers on that cursed journey into the depths of the Wood, and those that they had passed had been too-bright, or cloying-sweet, so beautiful that they could only have been poison. His mother simply smells like home.

Hanna says nothing about the moisture soaking into her shoulder; her fingers card through his hair soothingly.

"You can tell me everything that happened later," she says sometime later, mild but with an undertone of steel that Marek does not remember. "I'd like an explanation for some of the truly appalling things you did."

He chokes out a laugh, half a sob. There are many things he should be ashamed of, but he cannot muster any shame right at this moment. "I will."

"In your own time, Marechek."

He had always been overly aware of the passage of time, before. Conscious of his mother's absence, of how her time was running out, unwilling to even consider that it had already passed. Aware of what he needed to do to make a claim for the throne, and how swiftly he needed to do it—before the king died, before Sigmund and Malgorzhata assured Sigmund's own ascension.

It all seems so meaningless now, but even that realization pales in comparison to what Marek has now: forever, with his family. The children will join them - not too soon, with any luck - and Solya too, one day.

Until then, Marek is content to sit with his mother in her garden.


End file.
